Panicked they might pick wrong, Iowa voters are asking themselves: What would everyone else do?
DES MOINES—A woman in a long red winter coat stood up at a town hall the other day in Iowa and asked Pete Buttigieg about Michigan and North Carolina.
There were more than 300 people packed into a brick-walled, wood-floored room in heavily Republican Pella and Marion County, the biggest crowd any of the Democrats running for president had drawn in the town in this cycle, and Cathy Haustein told Buttigieg she was “kind of interested” in supporting him—but that her son in Detroit and her daughter in Charlotte, along with their neighbors and friends, were not. It worried her. What, she wanted to know, was he doing to extend his appeal beyond Iowa?
The question was a concentrated glimpse into an unprecedented anxiety gnawing at voters in this kickstart staple of the American primary process. In the past, Iowans, the citizens of this country with the earliest, most sustained access to the candidates, have helped everybody else begin to determine who ultimately could be “electable”—Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, even Donald Trump. Now, according to more than 80 interviews with Iowa Democratic strategists, county chairs, longtime caucus watchers and voters at a slew of top contenders’ events, it’s shifting to the other way around.
Due to the sheer scale of the field, an around-the-clock, screen-scrolling amount of attention paid to national polls, national media and social media, and a pervasive, almost debilitating trepidation about picking the “right” person to challenge Trump, how people perceive the candidates elsewhere is influencing how people are perceiving them here. National storylines are crowding out local issues. And in the last few fraught, fluid weeks heading into Monday’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, national chatter about who can win in November was weighing down Iowans’ brooding about who should win now.
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Panicked they might pick the wrong candidate, Iowa voters are asking themselves: What would everyone else do? https://t.co/ubQKOKaAol
— POLITICO (@politico) February 3, 2020
Don’t pick Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren
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